My 2 cents on given US politics, international affairs, issues, and etc

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Back To Basics Part 1

I don’t know about anyone else, but there seems to be plenty of issues within the United States that truly should be placed as a priority over international affairs. Since the Post World War II Era, the US has benefited from the US Dollar being named the world’s reserve currency status. This is the mechanism that makes the difference between old school measurements estimating deficit to debt spending accounts for over 80% of GDP opposed to over 93% of GDP historians estimate is the point of no return. Generally, when something goes wrong, you go back to basics to examine what happened or went wrong. This is what you’re supposed to do in the scientific method when your induction-deduction of a tentative hypothesis doesn’t stack up against the experiments or repeated experiments.

“The world is going America’s way,” Fareed Zakaria wrote in 2008. “Countries are becoming more open, market friendly and democratic.” Since the fall of communism, American leaders in politics, business and journalism have repeatedly broadcast the conceit that we live, or will soon live, in the best of all possible worlds…

What finally shattered such Panglossian notions was the demagogue on the campaign trail last year who ranted, credibly to many, about “American carnage.” It took the rise of Donald J. Trump in a harshly polarized country to shatter the belief that, as the critic Philip Rahv wrote in the early 1950s, the United States “is in its very nature immune to tragic social conflicts and collisions.”

Extravagant promises by ruling elites, and their unexamined assumptions, are at least partly to blame for this moral breakdown in the world’s most powerful country…

Generalizing about the world at large on the basis of personal success, or proclaiming that life has never been so wonderful, can be politically disastrous, it turns out, especially when loss, decay and fear sum up the experiences of many other people. We will have learned nothing from Mr. Trump’s victory if we do not examine today how and why American elites came to indulge in ressentiment-generating boosterism just as economic and cultural inequality was becoming intolerable to so many, and how their loss of intellectual credibility and moral authority brought about the post-truth era…

They feel deceived by a class of politicians, experts, technocrats and journalists which had claimed to be in possession of the truth and offered a series of propositions that turned out to be misleading or wrong: the rising tide of globalization will lift all boats, the market is free and fair, shock therapy would bring capitalism to Russia, shock-and-awe therapy would deliver democracy to Iraq. Many of the aggrieved now see the elites, who offered to expedite progress while expanding their own power and wealth, as self-serving charlatans…

“The rise of a surveillance state has raised questions about the legality of how law enforcement agencies acquire new technologies and inform the public of their use,” the Center for Investigative Reporting wrote in May 2014.

Post-9/11, individual privacy rights have routinely been placed secondary to national security. Pat-downs at the nation’s airports have crossed the line into accosting. Data collection and data storage have become mysterious workings of inner-government — ones that thrust even a questioning citizen among the ranks of the suspicious. Public schools have more and more frequently found it perfectly acceptable to enter parental domain to control what students eat, what children read and how they ought to think.

Government bodies that are supposed to serve the people — like the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Motor Vehicles, to name just a few — far too frequently subjugate, regulate and violate them.

The welfare of the collective is replacing the rights of the individual…

groups across the United States have advocated seceding from the country, their own states, or in a few cases, their cities. Recently, these efforts have ranged from fairly large, ongoing campaigns in Texas and California to smaller pushes in Oklahoma, Maine, Utah, West Virginia and New York’s Long Island, among others.

Despite the heightened interest in secession, many lawyers and constitutional scholars say it’s legally impossible for a state to secede because the U.S. Constitution doesn’t address the issue, and has no provision to allow it.

The United States populace is deeply polarized these days, and I’ve seen pieces attempting to largely downplay them such as

Maybe the real driver of this division is divisive language–more specifically, language that is designed to drive a wedge between us. In other words, maybe the divisions are an intentional consequence of the language we’re using.

Kulikowski makes a number of nuanced arguments in his talk, but his primary point is that the late-stage Roman Empire collapsed partly as an unintended consequence of rhetorical binaries, polarizing rhetoric that lumped an extremely diverse Imperial populace into false binaries: Roman or Barbarian, Christian or heretic, and so on.

But more recent psychological research, some of it presented in January at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), shows that it’s not so simple. These findings confirm that conservatives, liberals, the religious and the nonreligious are each prejudiced against those with opposing views. But surprisingly, each group is about equally prejudiced…

The ‘rhetoric’ or language is mainly a distraction from the US populace is divided by Democracy proponents and Republic proponents. How so? Democracy is Top-Down as the President controls the Legislature, and everything is a civil privilege that can be nullified by popular vote, decree, or ruling. Republics balance against the tyranny of the few and majority through checks and balances not to mention in the case of the United States Republic is made up of 50 Nation-States compliments of the equal powers’ clause ensuring new States of the economic-political union possessed the same powers as the original founding States. It’s also what the Southern States who became the Confederacy targeted in promoting the Top-Down Interpretation of the Supremacy Clause arguing ‘Regions taken by force or annexation should not be privy to the US Constitution.’ Lincoln opposed it, and you’re welcome to read his speeches that some books discusses. The Civil War was fought over expansionism and economic models; it is the basis of the economic model dependent on extremely low cost to free aka slave labor to be sustained.

What made the US different? It set the foundation that individual rights would expand from much of history dominated by Absolute Authority and Absolute Monarchy from the Paleolithic Era aka nomadic tribes via Chieftains to Neolithic Era that set the foundation for early settlements up to Nation-States largely controlled by Monarchy Dynasties of Absolute or Limited Monarchies. People who crave power aren’t interested in either sharing power or checks being placed on that power, and power is derived by authority. After the American Revolution, it was referenced as a foundation that can topple Monarchies, and Monarchies are very Top-Down and dependent on its Aristocracy to maintain power.

In this series preferably to 3 parts, I’m going to examine issues from a back to basics prospective.